Electric Eye Audio's The Thrasher is the first proper dedicated Thrash Metal High Gain Distortion Pedal - magnificently representing both West Coast and East Coast signature sounds

When you check out the Thrash Metal genre you can’t help notice how it came to be so heavily dominated by the West Coast California Bay Area movement - as seen by the fact that 3 of the ’Big 4’ hale from that area - Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer - with only Anthrax representing New York / East Coast. In fact if you cast your net wider to covering Newer and Vintage bands in that genre - the spread gets even more extreme with just a handful of bigger names - including Overkill representing the East Coast. Interestingly - ’Overkill’’s band name presumably comes from the Motörhead song title - which many cite as the key early influence for Thrash Metal alongside Queen’s track ’Stone Cold Crazy’.

So on The Thrasher pedal the Boost switch is labelled New York (EC), and Bay Area (WC) - with the first option representative of the more mids-forward sound signature of Scott Ian’s band Anthrax - essentially a tighter and more modern sound. While the down position delivers a Darker and Deeper somewhat scooped signature. Both sound properly immense - and it’s quite evident that EEA’s Silas Fernandes has spent a long time on exactingly calibrating those controls just so. As with all the EQ knobs - you get fully usable tones right across the sweep of each knob - and incredibly still usable just about with everything at Max.

The Net York Boost is essentially based on Scott Ian’s TC Booster/Distortion pedal, while the Bay Area Boost is based on using a ProCo Rat. Silas further explains that the core distortion circuit is largely based on a highly evolved JCM800 with significantly more heft to the bass. And the New York side is also pretty handy for 7 strings and lower tunings - giving you coverage for such behemoths as Meshuggah and Periphery.

The instruction sheet / manual warns not to take the Gain beyond the ’S’ Shredder level - while I actually kind of don’t mind it it fully ’Nutz’ dimed - in truth it shouldn’t really go above 3 o’c as you do get quite a bit of compression at the extremes. Largely though - the only controls I adjust regularly really are sweeping the Mids control between 9 o’c and 3 o’c - where my default position tends to be the ’9’ o’c, position, and switching up from Bay Area Boost to New York Boost. In some ways that switch is a little like going from Rhythm tone to Lead tone - so might be cool for future editions of this pedal to have the Boost switch as a second Footswitch. Gain sounds fantastic at the Thrasher and Shredder Markers - and up until 3 o’c it maintains that searing clarity - which after that can get a touch diminished at its peak.

Controls - Treble, Mids, Bass, Volume, Boost : New York (Tight Modern), Bay Area (Dark Classic), Gain (Thrasher / Shredder / Nutz).